Effects of Arousing Visuals and Redundancy on Cognitive Assessment of Television News

The Impact of Melodramatic News Coverage on Information Recall and Comprehension

“…Furthermore, there are different ways to measure and quantify knowledge acquisition, each functional to different modes of memory and comprehension (Eveland, Marton, and Seo 2004;Grabe, Bas, and van Driel 2015;Grabe, Lang, and Zhao 2003;Zhou 2005). Recognition of individual facts, subjects, or events through close-ended questions is often used to measure the accurate recall of individual data, whereas for retrieval and comprehension of information, participants are often asked to remember whatever they can after a news-viewing session, with researchers gauging the density of connections between facts.…”

“…In the last two decades, several scholars have explored the effects on viewers' recall and comprehension of information of news stories presented in a melodramatic fashion (e.g., Grabe, Bas, and van Driel 2015;Grabe, Kamhawi, and Yegiyan 2009;Grabe, Zhou, and Barnett 2001;Grabe et al 2000;Graber 1996;Lang et al 1999;Zhou 2005). Lang et al (1999) consider the limited capacity model to argue that how many cognitive resources are actually allocated by a viewer in a particular news report depends, on the one hand, on story processing and the incorporation of rhetorical procedures that suggest the viewer must pay attention (orienting responses), and, on the other hand, on content characteristics such as relevance, difficulty, and presence of emotion.…”

“…In an experiment, they presented participants with stories with different levels of dramatism, and then asked subjects to write what they recalled about what they had watched. They found that the exposure to dramatic news diminished the audience's capacity to freely recall information and reduced the complexity of their analyses, that is, the ability to recognize different points of view and perspectives, because such content interferes with news learning by activating simplified schemas, drawing the viewers' attention to the emotional elements of the story rather than other data (see also Klijn 2003;Zhou 2005).…”

Self-Concept, Product Involvement, and Responses to Self-Congruent Advertising

“…For instance, Singh and Churchill (1987) report that arousal may influence information processing in multiple ways. Zhou (2005) posited that the primary affective dimension driving attention and memory is arousal and not valence. It is possible that this self-congruity-evoked arousal may increase motivation to process and result in findings such as those reported in Wheeler et al (2005) where congruity appears to increase elaboration and thereby to influence persuasion.…”

The Influence of Television News Depictions of the Images of War on Viewers

“…Paivio (1986) posits that, ''affective reactions would ordinarily occur more quickly to pictures than words because the former have more direct access to affect-mediating images'' (p. 79). Visual content is processed quickly and heuristically, sometimes bypassing conscious thought (Zhou, 2005). Graber (1987) argues that people process visual information ''simultaneously rather than sequentially'' (p. 76).…”